


Through the Night

by phrenique



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scene, Movie: Star Wars: The Last Jedi, POV Rey (Star Wars)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-22
Updated: 2018-01-22
Packaged: 2019-03-08 07:55:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13453812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phrenique/pseuds/phrenique
Summary: His broken whisper, his luminous black eyes are entirely Ben, but all she can focus on is his outstretched gloved hand. The finality of the dark leather feels like defeat.This is mainly a possible exploration of THE missing scene from the Throne Room, with allusions to a clearly non-canon (as far as we know) version of Rey’s past on Jakku.





	Through the Night

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to A for her great advice, even though this isn’t her fandom.

 

“Please.”

Moving of its own will, Rey’s hand starts to reach out to his.

She stops it partway. His broken whisper, his luminous black eyes are entirely Ben, but all she can focus on is his outstretched gloved hand. The finality of the dark leather feels like defeat.

Rey starts counting, her disloyal heartbeat keeping score, while she borrows time against the weight of her friends’ lives. Ten more seconds of him and her not yet turned to bitter enemies.

Breathless, she lives the eternity promised in his gaze, of her next to him, never to be parted.

She senses his relentless hunger for her. Rather than a burden, it feels like the belonging she’s been waiting for her entire life. She’d like to be able to make a feast of it, take her time, join her mind to his even deeper. Touch maybe more than his fingers. His hair, his mouth. Kiss his brow. Her Ben, even if he’s now turned into Kylo.

He’s laid down his devotion for her in this room, and she did the same for him. It’s not enough. Memories of the past weeks stay sharp blades between them, still drawn. And Finn… Finn, stars willing, is still alive, on one of those transports, and she can’t find the words to make Kylo relent.

She inhales and her dream of them bleeds away.

Her hand doesn’t meet his glove. Instead, she pulls on the tether connecting her to the weapon held in his other hand, his first scepter as an Emperor.

Pooling slowly in her hand, the Force feels reluctant to do her bidding. It resists both their holds on the laser sword and recognizes no clear master, unlike their battle in the forest. Her eyes widen as fear and doubt fight over her mind. She is deemed unworthy.

The silvery hilt vibrates in place, convulsing like a fish on a line, caught between bait and freedom. Kylo’s sensitive features slip into a rictus of loathing that, after everything, feels like betrayal, and they’re dragged further apart. His chest-deep roar draws her own as they struggle with each other and the Force.

 _“Foolish child,”_ Snoke whispers, close to her ear, dripping poison in her heart, _“you thought you could turn him?”_

Foolish indeed. Kylo is still her enemy. This is where childish belief and the confidence of the rootless has taken her, and she acknowledges the truth.

She has failed everyone.  
Finn.  
The Resistance.  
General Organa. Han Solo.  
And most bitterly, she has failed herself and, stars be kind, she has failed Ben Solo. He’s lost to her beneath Kylo Ren’s mask, hidden away like the sun in an endless night.

When the break comes, the lightsaber’s hilt shattering between them in a blaze of light, she almost hopes for death.

 

——————

 

Rey’s alone in the dark. There is no ocean, no island, no peace. There is only pain.

The cold filled its belly with her meager flesh, and within it, her eyes don’t work and her body won’t listen. The pain comes and goes, her faithless companion, and she breathes in the spaces between, and wills herself to stop trembling. She fails and her torment crests with each convulsion her muscles struggle through. Beneath her, the disheveled pallet is soaking wet. She must be burning up, or worse, she’s soiled herself.

She’s not a baby anymore, she’s nearly ten. She won’t cry. He promised. He’ll come back.

And he wouldn’t like her squalling.

“Stop sweating off those eyes of yours. We’re in the desert now and you’re wasting water, sweetheart,” he’d once told her, and then gently tugged on her top bun to make her laugh through her tears and chase him. Her arms cross themselves against her small chest, as if she could actually hold on to him through memory alone.

She writhes again, while the pain worms deeper inside. He’ll never find his way home now, because she is his fire, and she’s burning out. The cold desert is inside her, there’s no water left to squeeze past her eyes and night has fallen.

She’s deaf to all sound, but her low keening vibrates against the tender tissues of her throat, and, in this queer manner, she soothes herself as she rides the waves of pain. After a while, the humming melts inside her skull bones, and they purr it along, until it feeds inside her brain, like some desert ritual chant. It soon becomes clear as a melody, and she strains forward blindly, reaching out to understand it.

 _“Sweet heart of mine, won’t you come back?”_ , comes a ghostly whisper. She weeps soundlessly; her ears have turned traitors.

 _“Won’t you come back? Come back to me, sweetheart.”_ The words tease and tempt and flay and cut.

Then, between one heartbeat and the next, he’s right there and it’s too much heat, within and without. She can’t breathe, his arms are bands of durasteel trapping her, and she fights against the fever of his body.

Her mind, though, stretches only too willingly to accommodate the brilliant blaze of his own as he weaves starlight, marrying ignored and half-forgotten pathways until they gleam like illumi-strips to lead her way. She chases after him with fervor, following him up the mountains of thought and down the valleys of dreams, always two steps behind, but never losing sight of his giant shadow.

The path widens, and she bursts into a sudden clearing, buoyed by a long-hoarded reserve of energy that propels her to him. He’s stopped here for now and busies himself with building a fire. The flames grow tall and proud as she eagerly explores her surroundings. She makes a game out of wiggling one way or the other to make her shadow dance against the bark of the spared trees. The expected laughter doesn’t come.

She returns to his side to see for herself what has captured his interest. He draws her in, puts a log in her hands and shows her how to feed the fire. Its wood is diseased, twisted and pitted from the rot inside, and there’s stacks and stacks of the same near them.

More appear with each branch turned to ash, and she shivers from the unwanted knowledge that they come from within her. He’s setting her on fire.

 

——————

_“Sweetheart, I need you to wake up.”_

——————

 

She flails wildly and nearly falls the several hundred feet that separate her from the ground, but for the sturdy grip he has on her lower back. Drowsing on a rappel line in the process of scavenging a star cruiser in the Graveyard of Giants is such an impossible feat that there’s more than a touch of hysteria in her laughter when it comes.

The secondary line audibly strains under his weight as he climbs it until he’s directly behind Rey. Silent and steadfast, arms above, feet below, he’s engulfing her completely. A carapax might feel like her right now, when the world sends it scuttling back in its shell-home, tender core grateful for its roughened exterior.

“Close your eyes and lose the prize, kid, and we want to eat tonight. Don’t we?” he says, placing his big hands over hers and guiding them in the search for upward recesses. He needs no answer, but she nods all the same and they clamber together. His boots serve as her own footholds when they reach a near seamless section. A secret smile relaxes her veiled mouth, while she teases him for being a giant. He wouldn’t dare tickle her in retaliation, not while they’re both suspended in a wreck with their next meal at the end of their lines.

When they are as far up as needed, they each go their own way for a faster salvage. This is a safer place than most, being the officers’ quarters, but Rey knows he trusts her to know her limits. To decide when to ask for help. His rule over her, enforced by the advantage of his age, is a gentle affair, burnished down by their shared years and lessons learned together.

Datapads, comlinks, blasters, usable medpacks and the likes, her internal itemized monotone drones on, as she searches every nook and cranny made by the upended or skewed fittings. It’s a peculiar dance with improvised steps that contorts and stretches her small body to match and overcome any obstacle. Ducking briefly under a giant exposed airlight fixture, Rey finds herself in a dark cubbyhole improvised by a side hatch and a bunk bed.

She agitates her glow stick, takes off her goggles and advances slowly on hands and knees. Her shallow breath passing through her cloth-mask scatters floating motes of dust every which way. She crawls ahead, mindful of the makeshift walls and the unfamiliar floor, towards a prize that might not even exist. But no, stars have mercy, at the very end of the recess, beneath an undisturbed blanket of dirt, lies a field pack. If it’s still intact, then their life is made, if only for a week, but maybe even more.

She struggles to contain her excitement while she drags away her treasure from its hidey-hole, moving faster on her way back. In the weak light waiting for her outside, she dusts off the pack as her nimble fingers search for any gap that would prove its contents unusable.

It’s a victorious Rey that returns to find him efficiently stripping the power conduits from the long corridor onto which all officers’ quarters open. Nervously, she watches him retread her exploration of the field pack and when he looks up, the crinkles gathering around his luminous black eyes give him away. He’s smiling for her underneath his protective lower-mask.

Her enthusiasm snares him too, and they both rush like children through the gathering of the reclaimed debris of other people’s lives and the loading-up of the sand skiff they’ve engineered from scrap.

One last trip down the rappel lines is what separates them from a laughter-filled night.

They’re more than halfway down, when a deafening boom blasts from up above them, from near the bow, where raw materials used to be stored. A beat later, the traveling shockwave hits the sloping surface structure beneath their hands and feet, making it shudder and groan. They’re thrown against a rugged wall hard enough that Rey bites her tongue and yelps.

The exposed structures have only begun settling down when she senses the absence of his breath on her neck. Her frenzied search finds him slowly swinging a dozen feet below her, his brilliant eyes closed and blood staining through his pale-colored head-wrap. His body is somehow still hunched on his line, but any second now it may relax enough to plummet him to his death, stars forbid it.

Fear is useless to her now, so she doesn’t cling to it as she searches through her satchel for both their salvation. He’ll live because she wills him to live.

One, two, three stim-shots in quick succession and she could run the whole desert wide for one day and one night straight. Her muscles burn with the need to move, so she slides down her line and grabs at him just as his body is finally thrown out of balance.

He’s twice the height and weight of her still-growing body, and her rappel line twists and creaks its menace, but it will hold them both. She knows it. In her mind, there’s no doubt that she too can hold on to him until they make it safely to the ground. What is hers, she never lets go of.

 

——————

_“Rey? Open your eyes, sweetheart.”_

——————

 

Someone is watching her sleep. After having walked home through the last dregs of the X’us’R’iia, Rey’s brittle skin pebbles with the awareness and it hurts like suffering through a thousand tiny blisters at once. The sharp jolt of fear melts into annoyance. She knows who the watcher is and she’s still angry with him.

“Leave me be,” she grumbles and turns her back on him. Beyond the cocoon of bedding, the inside of the AT-AT is near-freezing. There’s a small pang of guilt that she impatiently brushes aside when she remembers what he’s done. In a couple of days, maybe she can be persuaded to forgive him. If he brings her fresh fruit from trading with the off-worlders, like he usually does when he’s fallen from her favor. Perhaps some kind of pear, she loves those.

The inside of her lids is comforting and she cuts herself from here and now and falls back into her dreams. There, lies an ocean and its blue waters lap peacefully at the shores of a green island, smarter than any jewel-encrusted finery she’s seen in her scavenged data-holos.

The yearning for this lovely place isn’t new, but it doesn’t ache. Rey belongs on the long-forgotten, graceless, sand-filled planet named Jakku, with him by her side, always.

He drags her back to consciousness, his gentle hand pulling on her shoulder. She swats at him, a half-hearted attempt that doesn’t connect. He turns her completely and she looks at him, sleep-blurred eyes inspecting him in the eerie light of the halo-lamp.

He looks sick. Underneath his desert bronze, his face is bloodless. Panic skitters along her spine.

“I messed up.” It’s what she expected, but the tone, his lusterless eyes cut her to the quick.

There’s no easier given answer than to say she forgives him. She never wants to see that look again, ugly remnant from the early days of before.

His face remains a study of pain, his mobile features rigid and unfamiliar all of a sudden.

Rey flings herself upwards to place her small hand on his head. He bows it and doesn’t move while she drags her fingers down the soft waves of his hair, past one shell of large ear, up until they come to rest at his cheek. His skin is cold and unyielding under her cupped palm.

She wills him to come back to her, spilling words from her clumsy mouth, only half-formed but shedding emotion like moisture in the desert.

“Please.” This is the strongest weapon in her possession. Before him, it fell uselessly at people’s feet. It has never failed her with him.

He shrugs off her touch. Before she can feel the sting, he makes it better as he draws their hands in the favored position: his big hands, fused palms at the center, and her small ones on the outside, holding him tight. The thrill of their usual rhythms quiets her and she slides easily in the joining of their minds.

There’s nothing unknowable inside the bond. Rey walks the familiar paths between the lined trees of memory wreathed with lights upon lights that illuminate everything. Their mind is a place of truth.

She’s alone in her rule of the common grounds. He’s nowhere to be seen yet, though there’s an unsteady flicker in the near distance. He must be there, tinkering with something, like he usually does. Rey rushes ahead, her heart soaring like some winged creature to show her the way.

Time is meaningless. It takes all night and it takes a second to reach him.

There, she meets him in the most unexpected of places. Her feet don’t quite balk to enter the clearing where, years before, he lit the fire that saved her life.

The tree line has advanced defiantly from where she remembers it. They’re now growing in thickets, big and small trunks together, like families, like her and him.

Rows of lights cling to the branches of one tree, and then stretch to join it to the next one. Such is the way of all trees who carry memories within their crowns, like jewels.

In the shadow of a sapling, he’s molding starlight. Rey drops to the ground next to him, and waits. Some sort of switchboard, black shiny toggle on it, takes life between his fingers, and he joins it to the wire-mesh between the lights just above his head.

He flips it, and waves of color begin swirling inside all the light-globes, tinting them slowly. They’re a motley jumble, red near blue, green near violet, yellow near red, colors repeating with no visible pattern, stretching everywhere, from the first tree to what she can only feel in the distance, near the limits of their joining.

Her mind is actually alight with colors and Rey laughs and spins and dances among the trees, delighted with his gift to her. She grabs at a blue light dangling like a teardrop from the drooping branch of a wizened tree. It comes off easily into her hand, and she examines it carefully.

“You always think of me in blue.” Behind her, his voice breaks roughly, but the words are soft. He hasn’t moved an inch. He’s watching her, hands curled around a suspended light-globe, identical twin to the one she’s holding.

Her smile so big it’s hurting her mouth, she starts to go to him. No more than three feet separate them, when his fingers press violently together. The light within shatters.

_Rey’s body doesn’t feel her own. Her legs ache with the weariness of worn soldiers and her lungs pound against her ribcage like steelpeckers trapped in a cage. She’s out of breath and panicking._

_There’s a heart beating within her hand. Its blue light hurts her eyes, so she puts it away._

_Nothing makes sense._

_She’s walking at night, in a strange forest where all the trees are hung with pulsing light-globes, stretching as far as she can see, donning every color except for the one hiding in her pocket. Here and there, burned-out spheres break the continuity and indulge the dark gathering under them._

_Rey’s home has been in the desert for as long as she cares to remember, so this must be a dream. She’s had dreams like this before, with forests like these on distant planets, dreams in which she’s waiting for her parents to come take her away._

_Suddenly, a man surges in front of her, and she gasps. He’s tall and dark, wild-eyed and utterly foreign._

_He thrusts his bleeding hands towards her and she recoils in fear. Under the enduring light, she sees the shimmer coming off the tiny glass shards embedded in the meat of his palms. He must have broken his heart._

_Distracted by the absurdity of her thought, she startles when his hands clasp her shoulders. She can feel his blood weeping through the thin cloth._

_Her terrified eyes meet his own. “It’s just a dream,” she mutters to herself, “wake up!”_

_“Rey, wait for me. I’ll come back, sweetheart. I promise.”_

_He knows her name, this grim specter of a man, and that frightens her even more. She bites down on one of his wrists and manages to duck under his grasp. But her feet won’t budge further and she can feel him reaching for her again. She cries out as he touches her head, and darkness takes her._

  
_——————_

  
She’s not dead.

Awareness washes over Rey in a blood-chilling surge, much like the relentless sheets of rainwater of Ahch-To. Immediately, she has to fight back a scream when an ungiving weight scrapes along her right shin and catches at the edge of her knee-bone, digging in.

She needs a moment to focus herself, to go beyond the painful pressure crushing her leg, to anchor her body to the here and now. Breathing the way Luke taught her, easy in-easy out, eyes closed, she gathers the Force to her.

There are many dead things in Snoke’s chamber. The energy she takes from them squirms low inside her belly, as she tries to use it to read her surroundings. Reaching out with her lesser-used senses, guided by the Force, she explores near to as far as she can fathom.

Few minutes must have passed while she was unconscious. Inside, the fire she’d started is still alive, judging by the acrid tang and the the tell-tale crackle. Snoke’s throne room is still, but outside reigns pandemonium. At least three types of alarms are blaring over each other, and a mechanized voice is making an appeal for calm while the hefty commotion of people panicking swells in the lower decks.

This is not a Star Dreadnought currently in pursuit of Rebel forces. This is a thing broken.

Maybe Finn, maybe they’re all safe.

At the limits of her senses, Rey can feel the fires burning wildly ship-wide, the inner structures disintegrating under abnormal pressure or already lopped off, having left behind cauterized wounds. She can feel stormtroopers slowly suffocating under their armor, people dying.

She wrenches herself back, before she’s overwhelmed by all the suffering, all this death and decay that will feed no new life.

“She’s faking.” The voice comes from too far away to belong to the body that’s bent over her, trying to prod her into wakefulness.

It confirms what the Force whispers to her. Three live bodies in the room, besides Rey’s own. Only one of them is known to her, and its mind is hushed. The heavy boot pressing on her knee isn’t Kylo’s.

Two remaining obstacles between her and freedom, between her and the lives of her friends.

And her moment of action must be now. There are no guards inside the turbolift, nor are there patiently waiting down below to make her capture. She will make chaos her ally. She will get herself out of this dying ship and go reunite with the remaining Resistance. 

“On your feet, rebel scum!” A secondary point of pressure blooms against her belly, lighter and deadlier: a targeting blaster rifle.

Time’s up.

Rey’s arms come alive, viciously twisting the rifle out of the too-casual grip of the stormtrooper, pushing it up and away. With a high-pitch whine, its muzzle discharges a couple of useless plasma bolts that serve only to further damage the ornate ceiling.

Nearly at the same time, she kicks savagely, Force-heavy, with her unfettered leg into the unprotected side-joint of the trooper’s own knee. Before he can even begin to collapse, she drags him up and in front of her to use as a shield. His own blaster, she jams solidly against the unshielded area between helmet and body armor.

Rey thumbs the button engaging the lethal-mode, and he stops fighting her as soon as he hears the warning trill.

She feels like lightning come to life, borrowed energy flowing freely through her, almost more than her body knows how to handle. It comes at a price. Again, she hears Snoke hissing his malevolence in her ear. She doesn’t have the luxury of time to shake the voice out. Instead she chooses to focus on her remaining opponent.

Red-haired and sallow-faced, dressed in the all too-common all-black of his kind, he hasn’t bothered to draw out his weapon yet. He looks frail compared to Kylo, but his gaze is as poisonous as his dead master’s. His hatred towards her is an almost palpable presence.

“So this was Ren’s plan all along? To sneak you on board so you two could slaughter the Supreme Leader in his own chambers?” His voice matches the rest of his grating person, but he won’t make Rey waver. Not even Snoke could do that.

“I see now,” he goes on. “I knew Ren was a weak fool, but I hadn’t accounted for the traitor streak in him before.” His sickly-green eyes drop down to pour their venom on Ben’s figure, slumped on his back, halfway between them.

Rey lets him have his moment of useless loathing, while she turns her mind inward to search for a way out of this unforeseen snag. Again, she curses herself for her unprepared, ill-thought attempt to join Ben.

That such an effortless leap was made to the almost truth of the matter by Snoke’s officer troubles her. And if he can make it, others will too. This forces her hand.

She was counting on her small interlude in Kylo Ren’s life and what came of it to be misinterpreted by everyone else, for both their sakes. To be seen as Snoke’s error in judgement and be accounted as directly leading to his death.

Her hope was that she could painlessly detach herself from Kylo Ren’s path for now, leaving them both in a state of relative safety and neutrality, where final resolutions could be delayed.

This option has been taken away from her.

Danger is near, in the midst of the First Order. The fates of both Kylo Ren, as the new Supreme Leader of the First Order, and Ben Solo, the lonely boy she has come to know better than she does anyone else, hang yet in balance. Before she can escape, it must be resolved.

Three diverging paths unfold before her, hinged on the way she could now deal with the man that the Force chose to bind to her.

The first one, the cruelest one, will never be an option. It is repugnant to the very fiber of her being, to the delicate threads of her soul.

The second one, the righteous one, would negate Kylo’s choices, wrong as they may be. It would turn her into a worse traitor than his uncle in his eyes, and still might end in his death.

The third one, hazy and uncertain, is the one that could keep him presumably safe, and give her time and a chance to grow them back together.

In the end, there is no choice.

She pleads favor from the Force as she commits to this final path, and speaks out the words meant to protect Kylo Ren in front of this officer of Snoke.

“Weak fools, yes. That’s the only truth that came from your mouth.” She pauses. “Both your Supreme Leader and his boy were no match for me. The lackeys even less so. Skywalker himself has bestowed upon me more power than the Galaxy has ever known.”

The tone, the voice, the lines, they all come together so easily, yet she feels small inside her own body, witnessing herself talk like she were a stranger.

“What need do I have to conspire with a wretched mutt like Kylo Ren, when I can take whatever I want from anyone?”

His eyes widen in response to her serene smile. Oh, he’s finally starting to feel real fear, Rey thinks, uncharacteristic oily satisfaction spreading thin over her thoughts. Time for the dagger.

“Even you. I could put you on your knees. You’d tear the First Order down like the willing pet you are the moment I say jump.”

She’s not ready for the sudden energy flash spewing from his blaster pistol - he’s a quick draw, she’ll give him that - but she’s saved by her shield, the stormtrooper taking the full brunt of the hits. Rey allows him to fall to the ground, as she throws her hand in the air and lets Kylo’s knowledge of the Force guide her.

One by one, she stops and deflects the plasma arcs, while she advances on her attacker. He’s panicking now, judging by the fine tremor his trigger-hand displays. A deep layer of satisfaction coats her mind, very nearly cloying.

The plasma bolts suddenly stop, and she stops, a couple of feet in front of Ben’s defenseless body. She’s close enough to see the bloodshot whites of her enemy’s eyes. His weapon is not yet spent, but he doesn’t trust it anymore.

She reads the indecision in his body loud and clear. To attack her and engage in hand-to-hand combat, when she is the source of so much raw power, would be a folly unworthy of his rank. But she conspired to kill his Master.

Rey moves before he can, right arm stretching, her mind even faster, seeking to quickly rip the knowledge she needs from his mind. Bits of stray information, fragments of thoughts and surface emotions rush towards her at a gushing pace. It doesn’t scare her. It’s messier than expected, but separating the valuable from the worthless is a scavenger’s bread.

And oh, what a treasure trove she uncovers! The Rebels are currently on the run to an enforced fortress, and the plans to chase them stall in the wait of the Supreme Leader’s approval. They are safe for now. Her chest hurts with welcome relief.

And she might yet be able to steal precious minutes to gently coax the future onto her third path.

But Hux’s well of knowledge, she only gets to drain for mere seconds. Then he’s on her, enraged body pushing her back, throwing her to the ground.

He’s sturdier than expected under his orderly uniform, and, Force momentarily forgotten, Rey aches with the absence of her staff, like she would a missing limb.

In the course of a few furiously-drawn breaths, his fingers claw at her arms, while she uses them to protect her upper body. It’s a battle in which she’s rapidly losing ground, and, when he drives a hard elbow in her belly, she curls instinctively onto herself, surging towards him.

He meets her with his right fist, arcing to land a glancing blow to her temple. Time blurs, dulls around her. She’s drowning alone in the dark, and then suddenly within her, a blue light sputters, and a voice calls out:

_“Fight it, Rey!”_

Her head erupts above the dizzying waters, and she finds herself choking under Hux’s clenched hands around her neck. His eyes glow with inhuman satisfaction. Her palms slap ineffectively against his tightening clasp, and her squirming legs fare no better against his lower body. She gets pulled under again.

 _“I can show you the ways of the Force.”_ Kylo’s voice falls on her mind like a slash of crimson on untouched snow, and she’s again on that icy planet, discovering the Force under his burning gaze, her back facing the abyss. The fever wave of his mind takes her over, and she lets it.

It flows through her, eating its way through the dark energy she has buoyed herself with to defeat her enemies. It pulls at her muscles and rearranges her limbs, until her thighs are firmly fastened around Hux’s waist and her hands are squeezing his wrists.

Hux’s chokehold falters minutely as Rey’s body contorts into a constricting vise.

The blazing heat lurking in her brain presses its advantage immediately, connecting them again, mind to mind. It shows her a path, a pattern, an order. It shows her which nerve endings to set off and which to block by using the Force.

Hux’s hands slacken and she drags them away from her throat. She pushes him off and he topples onto his back. His eyes look alive, but his body is limp.

Rey could kill him right now. She doesn’t even have to use the Force, any scattered debris of what was once Snoke’s Throne Room would do. The fever coiled inside her head remains quiet. It leaves her the choice.

Except, she caught a glimpse of Hux’s position within the First Order. Snoke, his guards, his lackey, all dead, and Kylo Ren virtually untouched, the story would be damning. No, she needs him as evidence, as witness, for the falsehoods she’s weaving.

“I killed your precious Supreme Leader.” She crouches above him, bringing her raspy voice closer to his ear.

“For what you tried to do here against me, a weaker person might enjoy slowly torturing you to death.” Belly-side up, Hux’s impotent fury is directed to the ceiling.

“Both of you.” She rises, turning her back to Hux, and moves to join Ben.

She finds his lightsaber easily enough, and it feels familiar, lying dormant in her palm. The fever throbs inside her once, twice and she takes it as a warning to hurry up.

“Not me, though.” Holding on to Ben’s arms, she drags him gently to rest on his side, moves him in the safe position that she’s seen Zuvio use for the unconscious drunkards of Niima Outpost.

“Both of you are too puny to measure up to me.” She’s touching Ben, his shoulders, his face, the way he might’ve wanted her to, before she refused him. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever get to do it again. Her hands linger.

“Without your master, you are nothing but ring-dogs doing what they do best.” She fastens the lightsaber hilt to a clasp on Kylo’s belt, out of sight. One beat. Two. Three. Rey makes herself let go of him.

“Chasing their tails.” Quickly scouring the filthy floor in search for the fragments of her own lightsaber, she finds them next to one another, near the centre of the hall. It tears at her heart something fierce to see them thus broken. Sliding the two halves of a whole in her belt pouch, she marches up to where Hux is still immobilized on his back.

Her angry face is not make-believe when it enters Hux’s field of vision again. She slashes her right hand up before her, and his body rights itself, puppet-like. _“You will walk to Snoke’s throne and face it, your back to me. You will wait for me there. You will not move and you will not speak.”_

Her bidding is obeyed.

She allows herself a final look towards where Ben lies motionless, on his right side, facing her. She reaches out and tugs mildly at the floating tendrils of his external senses. They’re receptive, their murmur rising a notch, gathering strength, but her mind gentles them again into torpor. _“Eight more minutes,”_ she promises. She inputs the value on the alarm of her multichrono, another gift from General Organa.

Picking up Hux’s blaster from the floor at her feet, she deftly unloads the gas chamber, before approaching him. He’s staring fixedly at the throne, where half of Snoke’s remains still cling to his symbol of power. Rey sidles up to the side of him, out of his range of vision, but close enough so he can feel her breath hitting the patch of exposed skin at his throat.

Hovering her hand near his temple, she says: _“You will give me the codes to Snoke’s personal escape pod. You will tell me how to reach it unobserved.”_ He tries to fight her, of course he does. Her will is stronger.

His eyes are almost watering by the time she’s done with him. “Ah, a fine traitor you’ve become. You deserve a prize.” She slides his now depleted blaster into his holster, and then laughs, a low gravelly sound that scrapes past her abused throat, but must seem terrifying to Hux. _“You will not move and you will not speak.”_

The impulsive part of her mind clamors for attention, wants to rush ahead into the planning needed for her escape. She shuts it down, the fever serving as her enforcer. The third path, her only hope, is not yet fully shaped.

“I hear from my friend Finn, that your vaunted troopers are very well trained. In all sorts of adverse situations. So we’ll put it to a trial, see how their commander fares.” Hux’s eyes are bulging at their edges, trying to look at her.

“I’m going to leave you here face to face with the decaying remains of your Supreme Leader. In his hall, with his dead guards. With Kylo Ren, who is alive, a Force user still very much devoted to his fallen master.” She doesn’t dare use the Force to influence Hux into believing her words. That effect will be gone before she even leaves the ship. He must allow himself to be convinced by her value of truth of his own will.

“And you, a traitor that helped me escape on Snoke’s own prized ship. Me, his killer!” Rey laughs again, louder, and the sound breaks and echoes bizarrely against the wall that backs Snoke’s throne.

“Let’s see if you survive Kylo Ren’s wrath. I’ll leave you like this, unable to move or speak. With the stench of this rotten carcass gathering in your nostrils.” Come on, she chants internally, swallow the bait.

“But you have your weapon, and the moment I’m gone from the Dreadnought, you’ll have everything else back too. Certainly, there’s no telling when Kylo Ren might regain his senses. It’ll be a race. Let’s see if you win it.”

Only now does she stare directly into his eyes. She uses the barest shiver of thought to skim his mental surface and explore below. Victory ignites in her chest but she keeps the flame of it well-covered, smoldering beneath. Finally, she has him hooked, baited on shock and awe and base fear.

Rey starts moving away from him. She goes past Ben, filling her eyes until the last second with his familiar frame, and stops near the turbolift doors. She looks at her chrono. She doesn’t turn back, but her voice resounds clearly, aided by the throne room’s acoustics: _“Hux, you will not move and you will not speak for four minutes.”_

In the elevator, on her way down, she retreats within her mind, searching. The fever that pushed her, that saved her, is still there, but fading. It’s staying behind with Kylo, its engineer, and the longer the distance grows between them, the fainter its echo will be inside her.

Until then, it’s an exquisite binding which allows her to feel him wholly, his mind, his connection to the Force. There’s enough light in its fierce heat that it allows her the hope that they can turn this around. That there is balance to be found in the future. That her Force vision has not been a product of Snoke’s machinations.

Swift fall her steps, as she dodges past disorganized trooper patrols and disoriented droids, running through half-destroyed corridors that are sometimes on fire, and sometimes swamped with firefoam. The desert, her scavenging prove to serve her as adequate training for this terrain.

She counts in her head and then wastes precious seconds to check herself against the digits of the chrono.

The calculated timeline is precise. Kylo will regain consciousness just as soon Hux’s time expires. Besides, Snoke’s general has only the weapon she suggested he use, one that she’s left empty of fuel. And the tether between her and Kylo is stretched thin but unbroken, allowing her to jolt him into wakefulness sooner if need be.

Yet, Rey’s heart won’t believe her mind. It pumps her blood furiously, soaring like a bird ahead of her, to more quickly lead the way to her escape and his awakening. It staves off exhaustion and pain alike, flooding her with an energy that must have been long-hoarded for this moment right here.

Snoke’s private hangar is devoid of human presence when she finally reaches it, but rich in spacecraft. The repair droids are caught in their mindless tasks and ignore her, even when she approaches the berth indicated by Hux.

The maintenance personnel, the pilots, could have wandered away, been called away or even run away. Rey doesn’t care one whit about the reason of her stroke of luck, and she hasn’t the time to explore if therein lies a trap. The cursory Force-driven sweep will do. She trusts in the fate shown to her.

Snoke’s arrogance in his invincibility is written all over his presumed-as-impenetrable Star Dreadnought. Here, most of all. The security measures to his own escape pod are laughably easy to bypass. As she inputs the last of the needed codes, she rechecks the digits on the alarm. One minute to zero.

The fever tugs weakly at its root in her mind. Now that she’s far away from its creator, it feels more like the warmth coming off a fire, like the one in front of which they touched hands. She needs to let it go, it’ll hurt her more if it shatters with the distance. But not yet.

Rey settles down at the main command panel of the escape pod, and prepares to disengage from the allocated berth and launch out. The hangar’s massive doors open presently with another string of code tapped by courtesy of Hux’s knowledge. The alarm at her wrist beeps once in pre-warning: ten seconds to go.

As it repeats once each second in countdown to the time value she’s set, she pushes her will through the whisper-thin bond and she screams Kylo awake. The fever breaks. Her small craft becomes unmoored and hurtles away into the vast space beyond.

In the quiet of the stolen ship, Rey sits, heedless of the various signals coming off the front console, trying to gain her attention. She rests her head on her wrapped-up forearms, her hands covering her closed eyes. General Organa’s beacon flickers steadily through the thin skin of her lids, a pulsing blue light meant to guide her steps.

Her mind’s eye is turned backwards, though, reaching for Kylo through the Force awareness that’s been there ever since Starkiller. She’s been actively fighting against it, but now she welcomes it as she might a longed-for companion. It’s a weaker thread, granted, than the fever wave or even the Force-bond through which they touched fingers. It still allows her an impression of his mind, in spite of the vast distance growing between them.

He’s alive and unrestrained in his anger. She’s his enemy again, and perhaps no mercy will be shown to her when they next meet. But, he’s alive and safe. The path is set. There is hope.

When she finally removes her hands, her palms are gleaming in the stars’ luster with caught tears like smooth bits of jewel-glass.

The night is long and cold, but it eventually ends. She has faith in that. And when it does, she’ll be there to take his hand. They’ll walk together into the sunlight, just like in her vision. What is Rey’s, she never lets go of.

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading this. I hope you enjoyed it!


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